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In general, then, the left hemisphere’s tendency is to classify, where the right hemisphere’s is to identify individuals.
The systematic categorising process of the left hemisphere can sometimes begin to have a life of its own.
As Henry Maudsley put it: we have a sufficiently strong propensity not only to make divisions in knowledge where there are none in nature, and then to impose the divisions on nature, making the reality thus conformable to the idea, but to go further, and to convert the generalisations made from observation into positive entities, permitting for the future these artificial creations to tyrannise over the understanding.
An individual could be seen as a little universe, an infinite number of serial moments, experiences and perceptions (as the left hemisphere would see it), which are of course (at least as far as the right hemisphere is concerned) a single whole.
one cannot say that one hemisphere deals with single items (‘units’), and the other with aggregates. Both deal with ‘units’ and both deal with aggregates. Thus the right sees individual entities (units), and it sees them as belonging in a contextual whole (an aggregate), from which they are not divided. By contrast the left sees parts (units), which go to make up a something which it recognises by the category to which it belongs (an aggregate). However, the relationship between the smaller unit and the broader aggregate in either case is profoundly different: as is the mode of attention to
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How over what; Right: parts identied in the context of the whole hence the capacity to recognise someone (whole) who changed their hair (parts) Left: parts identified as making up the whole hence the fun of breaking and rebuilding things from scratch
Interestingly the right hemisphere’s concern with the personal past may be directly linked to something else we will come to, its tendency towards feelings of sadness.
In circumstances of right-hemisphere activation, subjects are more favourably disposed towards others and more readily convinced by arguments in favour of positions that they have not previously supported.
Curiously it seems that the left hemisphere reads emotions by interpreting the lower part of the face. Though the left hemisphere can understand emotional display, it looks not at the eyes, even when directed to do so, but at the mouth.230 The right hemisphere alone seems to be capable of understanding the more subtle information that comes from the eyes.
one exception to the right hemisphere superiority for the expression of emotion is anger.256 Anger is robustly connected with left frontal activation.257 Aggression is motivating and dopamine plays a crucial role in the rewards it offers.
Although facial expression of emotion is a human universal, there are, inevitably, differences in facial expression across cultures; and because of the very fact that the left hemiface displays more complex emotional information, being able to convey mixed feelings, it seems that it may be easier in cross-cultural situations for people to read the relatively simple information conveyed by the right hemiface.
The right hemisphere’s affinity for both the perception and expression of emotion appears to be confirmed by the strong universal tendency to cradle infants with their faces to the left, so that they fall within the principal domain of attention of the adult’s right hemisphere, and they are exposed to the adult’s own more emotionally expressive left hemiface.267 This preference is known to go back at least 2,000–4,000 years,268 and even left-handed mothers display the leftward cradling bias.269 In fact even chimpanzees and gorillas show the same leftward bias for cradling their infants.
It seems to me a possibility that those emotions which are related to bonding and empathy, whether we call them ‘positive’ or ‘negative’, are preferentially treated by the right hemisphere, as one would expect: such stimuli capture right-hemisphere attention.286 By the same token, those to do with competition, rivalry and individual self-belief, positive or negative, would be preferentially treated by the left hemisphere.
subjects with relatively greater left-frontal activation at rest ‘may be able quickly to terminate their reaction, while subjects with right-frontal activation may lack the requisite coping skills to minimise the duration of the negative affective response’.306 Depressives relatively favour the left visual field and make more eye movements to the left in ways that have been validated to suggest right-hemisphere activation.307
Could this relate to form of meditation helpi g depreasive symptoms abbte in that the left if trained nd strengthened to identify sensations (of depression in this case)?
Thus depression resulting from damage to the right hemisphere has more of indifference or apathy – a global, vague lifelessness – in contrast to the anxious, disturbed depression, accompanied by biological features, resulting from lesions to the left hemisphere.
Does this suggest therpies that focus on rehabilitating the side of the brain with the lesion or training the side of the brain wirhou the lesion?
anxious apprehension, based as it is on a fear of uncertainty and lack of control – preoccupations of the left hemisphere – is accompanied by preferential left hemisphere activation.
More explicit reasoning is underwritten by the left hemisphere, less explicit reasoning (such as is often involved in problem solving, including scientific and mathematical problem solving) by the right hemisphere.
the precuneus, a centre that lies deep inside the parietal lobe, is deeply connected both with emotion – it forms part of the limbic system – and the sense of the self. It is one of the brain’s most consistently ‘hot’ spots, with a high resting metabolic rate, and it goes quiet in altered states of consciousness where the sense of self is no longer active, such as sleep, anaesthesia and vegetative states.
will become apparent only in the next chapter, is that it is the right hemisphere that has the intuitive sense of numbers and their relative size. However, the sense is approximate and does not have precision. The left hemisphere, by contrast, has precision, but it has no intuitive sense of what it is actually doing, other than following rules and manipulating symbols.
we know that the left hemisphere carries an image only of the contralateral (right) side of the body – when the right hemisphere is incapacitated, the left part of the individual’s body virtually ceases to exist for that person. It is only the right parietal lobe that has a whole body image.329 Importantly this body image is not just a picture. It is not a representation (as it would be if it were in the left hemisphere), or just the sum of our bodily perceptions, or something imagined, but a living image, intimately linked to activity in the world – an essentially affective experience.330
An arguments for awareness exercises like meditation.
Also perhaps movement based awareness that aims to build connectections the body. E.g. Proper crawling with alternating, non-parralell arm and leg movement i.e. Left arm and right leg forwards, right arm and left legs forwards
The right hemisphere, as one can tell from the fascinating changes that occur after unilateral brain damage, is responsible for our sense of the body as something we ‘live’, something that is part of our identity, and which is, if I can put it that way, the phase of intersection between our selves and the world at large. For the left hemisphere, by contrast, the body is something from which we are relatively detached, a thing in the world, like other things (en soi, rather than pour soi, to use Sartre’s terms), devitalised, a ‘corpse’.
The right hemisphere’s superiority in the emotional realm is explicitly linked to this close physiological relationship with the body.345 This is a further reason why we hold babies to the left: ‘the emotional impact of touch, the most basic and reciprocal mode of interaction, is also more direct and immediate if an infant is held to the left side of the
Rather the superiority for language stems from its nature as the hemisphere of representation, in which signs are substituted for experience.
The right hemisphere’s particular strength is in understanding meaning as a whole and in context. It is with the right hemisphere that we understand the moral of a story,358 as well as the point of a joke.
an observation of John Napier’s about the relationship between lying and explicit versus implicit communication: ‘If language was given to men to conceal their thoughts, then gesture’s purpose was to disclose them.’377
How frequently a touch by the shoulder, a handshake or a look tell more than can be expressed in a long monologue. Not because our speech is not accurate enough. Just the contrary. It is precisely its accuracy and definiteness that make speech unsuited for expressing what is too complex, changeful and ambiguous.
So to is the relationship between verbal or written language and imagery and theatre or ceremony. As a good novel contains meanings that a strong thesis can't hold.
Perhaps this also points the the significance of meditative experience in that the present is thought-less whilst our didactic thoughts fill the past and future, or rather our past and future are largely only accessible via thought; of varying forms but thoughts none the less, limited limited by their linguistic definiteness or accuracy compared to the more nebulous meaning of experience.
Meaning is more than words.
Therefore, when we try to define meaning with goals, which in turn are articulated in words, we lose the somatic essence of meaning.
Actually the music is not just in the gaps any more than it is just in the notes: it is in the whole that the notes and the silence make together.
The wholeness made of opposites or meaning found in the interactions between the diad also point to the inefficiency of language, which relies on the defined being that wshich it defines and not being that which it doesnt.
In this way music, imagery and drama embrace the wholeness of duality whilst language (written especially but also non-figurative spoken language) rests on one side of the binary. It aknowledges the other by excluding it in the haze of the infinite of the undefined.
Gorgias wrote that ‘awe [phrike] and tearful pity and mournful desire enter those who listen to
Music seems, in other words, to expand the range of possible emotions limitlessly because the emotion experienced is so bound up with the particularity of the work that mediates it, yet the lexicon with which we are obliged to describe the feelings remains frustratingly limited.
‘the thoughts that are expressed to me by music I love are not too indefinite to be put into words, but on the contrary too definite.’
As Nietzsche put it: ‘Compared with music all communication by words is shameless; words dilute and brutalise; words depersonalise; words make the uncommon common.’
Time is the context that gives meaning to everything in this world, and conversely everything that has meaning for us in this world, everything that has a place in our lives, exists in time. This is not true of abstractions and re-presentations of entities, but all that is is subject to time.
Hints at the graduations of meaning and transfomation of meaning as information is collected, recorded and distributed. I.e. In the fist and last especially it moves through time and can change in tht movent (chinese whispers, transcription errors etc) though after the second it remains frozen and eternally the same except for erosion by processes not related to meaning like the aging, crumbling and disintegration of a page of paper.
Consider how spoken language changes or evolves relative to its exposure to written language.
Think also about the increase in meaning from words written for a character in a script with or without the words of the other characters before or after them (time abstracted) and then again in those words expressed aloud, with or without nonverbal aspects of thei bing expressed.
Time is essentially an undivided flow:
Like a river, though we are not moving with thr current but against it. Time isn't rushing forward we are. It rushes past us. Thus, even if one got out of the river, they couldn't return to the past because it has passed and continues to do so so quickly. One perhaps could rush faster still towards the future before juping back in, but for what purpose other than curiosity, time is still lost.
Further, like a flow and in contrast to the illusion of time found in a flipbook, it cant be paused in a moment without removing something from context. As drop of water is not the flow of the river (as much as it is too) compared to how a still from a movie is a clear moment in the film. Static images compared seperated by the frame of the film negatove or the corner of the page compared to the uniformity and fluidity of water particles reaching a crital mass. (perhaps this is where the analogy breaks down actually or at least ive lost the words to articulaTe.)
This is another instance of how something that does not come into being for the left hemisphere is re-presented by it in non-living, mechanical form, the closest approximation as it sees it, but always remaining on the other side of the gulf that separates the two worlds – like a series of tangents that approaches ever more closely to a circle without ever actually achieving it, a machine that approximates, however well, the human mind yet has no consciousness, a Frankenstein’s monster of body parts that never truly lives.
time itself is (what the left hemisphere would call) paradoxical in nature, and that music does not so much free time from temporality as bring out an aspect that is always present within time, its intersection with a moment which partakes of eternity. Similarly it does not so much use the physical to transcend physicality, or use particularity to transcend the particular, as bring out the spirituality latent in what we conceive as physical existence, and uncover the universality that is, as Goethe spent a lifetime trying to express, always latent in the particular.
interesting finding here, as the authors themselves put it, is that ‘without batting an eye’ the left hemisphere draws mistaken conclusions from the information available to it and lays down the law about what only the right hemisphere can know: ‘yet, the left did not offer its suggestion in a guessing vein but rather [as] a statement of fact…’
The ‘functions’ are not arbitrarily housed together in this or that hemisphere: they form, in the case of either hemisphere, aspects of two whole ways of being in the world.
Certainty is also related to narrowness, as though the more certain we become of something the less we see.
There are many similar case reports.
Does succesfull therapy, for cases of people experiencing these sorts of challenges wothout tumors, relate to a balancing of dominance between the hemispheres?
The evidence is that this is not because insight makes you depressed, but because being depressed gives you insight.
Sadness and empathy are highly correlated: this can be seen in studies of children and adolescents.470 There is also a direct correlation between sadness and empathy, on the one hand, and feelings of guilt, shame and responsibility, on the other.
Perhaps to feel at all is inevitably to suffer. The Greek word pathe, feeling, is related to pathos, an affliction, and to paschein, to suffer: the same roots are in our word ‘passion’ (and a similar development leads to the German word for passions, Leidenschaften, from the root leiden, to suffer).
Pain, suffering, and the loss of pleasure, then, sometimes constitute who we are and what we value. They are essentially woven into our deepest commitments.
The source of meaning. It is as though there is a treat within a pile of rubbish but remove the (no, recognise the rubbish and the treat have the same nature) and rather than be left with nothing one discovers a great open field previously obscurred with treats and rubbish.
cruelty does not exist in ‘nature’: only humans with their left prefrontal cortex have the capacity for deliberate malice. But then only humans, with their right prefrontal cortex, are capable of compassion.
Empathy is intrinsic to morality.
Society (other beings) are essential for our most sublime divinity and our most mundane wickedness. The is no oportunity without them.
The right frontal lobe’s capacity to inhibit our natural impulse to selfishness means that it is also the area on which we most rely for self-control and the power to resist temptation.
as if trapped in a hall of mirrors: it only discovers more of what it already knows, and it only does more of what it already is doing.
A source origin of subjective bias?
Conscious awareness of the self is a surprisingly late development in evolution. The higher apes, such as chimpanzees and orang-utans, are capable of self-recognition, but monkeys are not: they fail the mirror test.
It is likely that this part of the brain expands during the period of playful interaction between infant and mother in the second half of the first year, and the second year, of life, during which the sense of the self emerges, and indeed the right orbitofrontal cortex is seen by Allan Schore as the crucible of the growing self.
